Football is, according to the first Super Bowl I attended in person, a game where a bunch of guys push each other around on the field and every few minutes someone sees how far they can punt or kick the ball. The guys in blue kick toward the yellow poles but the guys in white just kick it back across the field.
This happens for about three hours, with a break for alandmark cultural performance.
Then, in the final hour, there is a lot more action – but, somehow, even less drama. They run back and forth repeatedly, and yet the scoring mostly feels like window dressing. There are moments of brilliant athleticism, feats of undeniable dominance by one team that, in some ways, make the whole thing feel more fair because it ensures this was not a game of inches or margins.
The winner was never really in doubt; there are no lead changes and no must-make plays.
It would be boring — if the 70,000 people in attendance had come out here just to find out which team will win. But of course, that's not why they're here.
They could do that at home on their couch. They could do that without even watching at all, just glance down at the glowing rectangle that's already in their hand and probably it will tell would tell them who won Super Bowl LX.
Being here, paying however many thousands for tickets and airfare and all the related costs, is for something else. To attend the Super Bowl in person is to court ambiguity and inefficiency, and possibly even discomfort or disappointment, in exchange for having experienced that one game the only time it ever happened.
Going to the Super Bowl is about participating in monoculture while simultaneously asserting your singularity. More than 100 million people watched the Super Bowl. But most everyone you know didn't go to the Super Bowl. You did.
It doesn't make you better than them, it just means if they want to know what it's like to attend the Super Bowl, then they'll probably ask you about it. In this isolated and fractured social moment? That's not nothing.
A game like this, if you watched it on TV, would be forgettable. Going to the Super Bowl – because your team is contending or it's come to your city or because your career has brought you here or, hell, even because you're so rich that it doesn't matter if none of those other constituencies apply – makes it more than a game, makes it a talisman to something about yourself, makes it memorable.
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Sports have always represented one of humankind's most resolute rejections of nihilism. How can you say nothing matters when sports conjure stakes out of thin air?
Every season teams vie with utmost seriousness for a title that doesn't do them any good at all when the next season comes just a few months later. Fans invest for the sake of bragging rights, but then they stop watching as soon as a champion is crowned. They have to – the game is done.
This is why sports retain the rare commercial value as live programming. The immediacy feels important because the whole point is to come together and watch an unscripted story unfold while letting your nervous system be buffeted about by the collective belief that there are two truly different futures hanging in the balance. Besides, you never know when you're going to see something amazing.
That uncertainty comes with a risk. Highlights are cool – and increasingly the predominant way in which short-attention span consumers mainline the adrenaline of sports while becoming inured to the narrative – but they exist without buy-in and therefore can never truly pay off.
And nothing is a better testament to all that than attending a (let's be honest) kind of bad Super Bowl. Attending a bad Super Bowl is the Super Bowl of communal experiences. All the pomp and circumstance without the promise of a worthy spectacle. They do it because we're all here and we're all here because they do it. An expensive mutual fiction that this all matters. That there's importance to be found in the purely fun stuff.
Something can be big without being serious. It can be significant and meaningful because enough people agree that it is. What makes a Super Bowl so fun to attend live is that lots of people do and even more people want to.
It's crazy that anyone cares at all to get off their comfortable couch and to watch a game where the outcome doesn'treallymatter and no one is scripting it to ensure any narrative tension. You could get a dud. You could get the Seahawks routing the Patriots and not even pulling off the first Super Bowl shutout along the way.
You could have even been a Patriots fan watching all that unfold.
I'm glad they were there, in their Brady jerseys and their "I <3 Drake Maye" shirts, singing "Sweet Caroline" in the fourth quarter even as the game stayed firmly out of reach. I'm glad they were there, caring about the Super Bowl alongside me. It made my first time attending unforgettable.
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